The Place I Will Always Call Home

Rarely a place becomes your home, not because you stay in there, but because it embraces you every time you come over.

I remember,

How you watched me grow

Playing in thy verandah,

Catching dragonflies in your garden

Waiting for Nani's handmade food

Fooling around in the sweltering summer afternoons.

Your walls have witnessed my childhood, how I use to be when adulthood and its pangs hadn't painted me.

Your boughs are stained with all the outdoor games and the mischief I did. You know how I unapologetically craved for Nani's Lucchi and Curry.

You have watched over me when food became my best friend and how it started being visible in my thighs.

Your roof became the most comfortable bed on summer nights when I peacefully slept gazing at starry lights. Your garden knows my secret site where I caught the highest number of dragonflies.

You have laughed at all the flogging I got for loitering around

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under scorching summer sun. You have grieved with me when our beloved left us for heavenly abode leaving behind their imprints in every nook of yours.

Today, when your residents and regular visitors abandoned you, you are someone else's house, implying that when a place loses its belongings it no longer remains a home.

Now, every time I visit you, I watch you perishing in the dust, kneeling, surrendering to the conspiracy of life. I have seen you standing strong and stout for us, but now you resemble an old man, who has lost everyone he ever owned, a tree that is abandoned of all its bearing, a pond that is devoid of all that it held.

The crack in your ceiling replicates how much you broke when you were left alone, to haunt in your emptiness. The damp walls exhibit how much you have wept in all those solitary years. I can hear you wailing coyly in silent nights, notifying me that you are dying, with each passing day, you are perishing into Oblivion.